The first comprehensive history of the Revolution in English in more than thirty years, A New World Begins brings a fresh perspective to the story of the French Revolution. Jeremy D. Popkin’s sweeping narrative integrates recent scholarship on the movement’s radical debates about women’s rights and its confrontation with slavery, and shows how the revolutionaries anticipated modern concerns about populism, relations between church and state, and the impact of changes in the media.

Jeremy D. Popkin is the William T. Bryan Chair of History at the University of Kentucky.  His previous publications include Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799 (Duke University Press, 1990), History, Historians and Autobiography (University of Chicago Press, 2005), You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography (Oxford University Press, 2015).  He has been a visiting professor at the Collège de France, Brown University, Australian National University, and the Martin-Luther-Universität in Germany. 

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest and the George Washington University History Department for their support.